This application relates to differential transmission lines in circuits such as integrated circuits.
Electronic circuits use electrically conducting paths or interconnects to interconnect various circuit elements. The properties of such interconnects, especially the global interconnects, are known to have significant or even dominating impact on the circuit performance and the power consumption. Therefore, the designs and engineering of the interconnects have attracted much attention in the field of electronics, especially in integrated circuits.
In many integrated circuits, various interconnects are implemented by inverter repeated RC wires. In this design, each interconnect is basically multiple conductive wires that are interconnected by inverters. The RC responses of such interconnects cause latency in the electrical signaling and the latency increases as integrated circuits operate at increasingly higher clock frequencies. In some applications, the inverter repeated RC wires can no longer keep up with the pace of advances in transistor speed at a satisfactory cost of power consumption. See, e.g., R. Ho, K. W. Mai, and M. A. Horowitz, “The Future of Wires,” Proc. of IEEE, vol. 89, No. 4, pp. 490-504 (2001).
Several interconnects for integrated circuits have been developed as alternatives to the inverter repeated RC wires, including on-chip optical interconnects and RF wireless interconnects. See, e.g., N. M. Jokerst et al., “The Heterogeneous Integration of Optical Interconnections Into Integrated Microsystems,” IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Quantum Electronics, Vol. 9, No. 2, pp. 350-360 (2003) and M. F. Chang, V. P. Roychowdhury, L. Zhang, H. Shin, and Y. Qian, “RF/Wireless Interconnect for Inter- and Intra-Chip Communications,” Proceedings of the IEEE, vol. 89, no. 4, pp. 456-466 (2001).